" I
saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging
themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded
hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night,
who
poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who
bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who
passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who
were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene
odes on the windows of the skull. " Howl, Allen Ginsberg
Two
years ago I was quite depressed, I had been undergoing a rough
breakup, my mood was very suicidal in away, nihilist to an extent
until I discovered Allen Ginsberg and it was the best thing that ever
happened to me. By the time I had an online friend ho had this
middle-aged bearded man on his facebook cover picture, with a link to
HOWL, I was raging with curiosity to discover more about the
mysterious hippie, he looked so free, independent, and careless, my
friend later on advised me to read Howl, the first time I was taken
by the Jazzy Rhythm, later on while I was confiding my misery to my
friend, he said that I should listen to the recorded Howl, and read
it along out loud, and feel the words running through my veins.
Beat
Generation or Beat Movement is the result of political, economic and
literary frustration, it is a generation that sought liberation from
all these constraints, and wanted to get rid of formal ways of
dealing with poetry, they were politically engaged, and most of them
were drop outs, or jobless. Beat stands for weary, and it also
connotes a musical sense, a spiritual movement. Inclusiveness of the
beat generation. Popular culture.
the
beat generation relationship with the hippie movement. Basically, the
hippies are the result of the beat generation, the term hip was first
used by Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Also, both movements share
the same values which are love, peace, and liberation. The hippies
wanted to alienate themselves from the standard American way of
living, and the protested by dropping out of society, by living in
communal groups, or the cult of traveling or going into the
wilderness. Actually wilderness represented the primitive, natural,
and authentic way of living they felt they needed in order to feel
spiritual and meaningful, on the hand one can easily notice the
second hand store clothes, the unshaved beards and long haired males
and females in addition to the spread of naturist culture and
behavior, on the other hand the hippies and beat generation
engagement were all against the modern destructive consumerist
culture and the Vietnam war, most hippies were vegetarians or vegans,
and the hippies are the ones to invent and celebrate Earth Day for
the first time. To conclude both the hippies, and Beatniks were a
result of the political sphere and decisions of America, and are a
reaction against war, capitalism, and climate destruction.
Allen
Ginsberg, at least for me, is the main figure of the beat generation,
and his poetry is universal, prophetic, and timeless. Discovering the
poems of Allen Ginsberg for the first time felt like salvation, like
I was redeemed, and the fact that he and I don’t share the same
culture, nor language just shows the universality of his poems, the
generation described in his poems is not only the American generation
of the fifties, it is every generation living under a capitalist,
consumerist, violent, and unjust regime, it is every generation
living In a culture of conservatism, homophobia, and exclusiveness in
general.
In
my country, Morocco, more young people are turning to the beatnik
culture without knowing it, at least most of them don’t know it
yet. First reason I see is the influence
of the Beat Generation on American pop culture, music and film
mainly, for example the movie Into The
Wild is widely appreciated among youngsters, actually every year
hundreds if not thousands of Moroccans hitchhike through the woods
and mountains of Morocco, or go the Essaouira Festival, which is an a
Gnaoua festival where you can notice the crazy long hair, and afro
haircuts, hippie way of dressing, in addition to the drug use during
the festival, two examples of the effect of the beat generation in
Morocco is Anass Yakine, a young Moroccan who dropped out of
university to spend two years walking around the country and who is
now quite a popular figure in Morocco, second example is Djebli Club,
an ecological commune located in Mokrisset, near ouazzane City, which
has became last year a popular destination for people with
alternative or beatnik minds. Second reason for turning to beatnik
values is to escape injustice, violence, and intolerance committed
both by the state, and the traditional Moroccan society.
Showing
the influence of the Beat generation on American society is best done
from a literary perspective. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee
Williams, William Burroughs, William Carlos William, Jimi Hendrix and
a lot of the modern and postmodern literary and artistic figures of
America used to frequently visit Tangier, in fact Paul Bowles lived
his last fifty years in Morocco, and he had a huge impact on a
generation of writers and musicians, mainly on a distinguished
Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri.
Mohamed
Choukri in his first book “For Bread Alone”, which he wrote in
jail and later on collaborated with Bowles to translate into English,
tells us the story of his family who was driven by famine from Rif to
Tangier when he was still a kid, to find himself later on homeless, a
kid to face a big crowded city such as tangier. For Bread Alone
depicts the underground or the rough aspect of the Moroccan society,
it brings in controversial and sensitive topics that were for ages
hidden under the rug, such as prostitution, homelessness,
homosexuality, and famine, it also deals with the political context
of the 40s and 50s. For Bread Alone was described by Tennessee
Williams as, “A true story of human desperation, shattering in its
impact”, in fact the two authors were close friends, and there is a
collection of there correspondences available.
As
Howl, when For Bread Alone was published in 1972 it was hugely
attacked, specially after it was published in classical Arabic in
1982. You can compare Mohamed Choukri’s masterpiece to Jack
Kerouac’s On The Road in terms of tone, both of them were written
and expressed in slang and underground culture, both depict the
immediacy of experience which carries with it moving emotions.
In
the near future I will get into details and analysis of beat
generation poetry and literature, and also some of the Moroccan
postmodern writers as a sequel to this introductory article.
